Why Central AI Governance Committees Are Failing Healthcare—And Their Fix

InnovationWhy Central AI Governance Committees Are Failing Healthcare—And Their FixByDavid Talby,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 01, 2026, 09:00am EDTDavid Talby, PhD, MBA, CEO at John Snow Labs. Solving real-world problems in healthcare, life sciences and related fields with AI. getty​A new institutional fixture has emerged across healthcare: the AI governance committee. From academic medical centers to regional health systems and pharmaceutical firms, these bodies have been set up as the ultimate gatekeepers—diverse, knowledgeable panels that review every AI proposal before it starts and every system before it goes live.The promise is real, and the reality is setting in differently. As these committees proliferate, many have become bureaucratic hurdles that produce governance theater rather than meaningful risk mitigation. If health systems, payers and pharma companies want to move from dozens of AI pilots to hundreds of production systems, the manual committee model has to change.​The Mandate Versus The Reality​In theory, an AI governance committee operates like an institutional review bard or a pharmacy and therapeutics committee. A project team submits an impact analysis and a risk assessment. The committee of clinicians, attorneys, ethicists and IT leaders reviews it against the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) guidance, HHS HTI-1, ACA Section 1557, ISO/IEC 42001 and a growing list of state-level rules. In practice, the model collapses under three weights.​The Expertise Gap In Project TeamsWe expect the people building or buying AI to perform their own risk assessments. A person running a revenue-cycle optimization project is rarely an expert in the hundreds of laws and standards governing AI. To produce a quality assessment, they need to understand Section 1557’...